The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. By Mark A. Noll. Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, c. 2006. Pp. xii, 199. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3012-7.)

Historians often find the Civil War era a high point for "civil religion" in American history for good reason: that war originated largely over a moral issue that had been disputed in church circles earlier than in government circles. In this published series of lectures Mark A. Noll applies his great expertise in American religious history to the theological dimension of the sectional conflict. Scrutinizing contemporary Christian analyses of the slavery issue and the war, he illuminates the controversies and their place in American religious history. By relating them to the long-term trajectory of American Protestantism, Noll offers a way to integrate histories that others have compartmentalized or spliced in clumsy ways.

In this, as in many of his books, Noll holds the Christians he studies to a high standard and finds them wanting. In describing the antebellum religious scene, he emphasizes characteristics of low-church American revivalism: skepticism about authority and tradition, reliance on common sense, and devotion to American culture and republican governance. In those characteristics Noll finds a source of weaknesses that church leaders would show in and after the Civil War. The crisis, he concludes, was that their "voluntary reliance on Scripture led only to deadlock over what should be done about slavery" (p. 159). Their "public failure" was that they did not lead the whole United States to a consensus settlement of the future of slavery through biblical interpretation and moral suasion (p. 160). Noll's standard may appear amazingly high, but it does describe what many theologians had hoped to do.

In identifying and describing theological positions Noll makes reasonable judgments and selection of representatives. He sees clearly, as many have not, the important differences between defenders of slavery and conservative emancipationists, even as he differentiates each of those groups from Christian abolitionists. He takes care to include African American, Catholic, and British and European theologians, valuing them as thinkers uninfluenced by the cultural conditioning of white Protestant Americans. He sometimes commends in their writings ideas that he apparently overlooks in white American Protestant sources.

Tracing in broad strokes studies of the biblical status of slavery, Noll finds that most antislavery interpreters were captivated by their libertarian ideology; proslavery ones, by their sectional self-interest; conservatives, by their caution; and almost all, by their racial prejudice. Across the spectrum, he rarely credits the participants with intellectual quality and moral responsibility or for the ways that they transcended racism. He finds most impressive the critics who argued that the southern form of slavery differed essentially from the kinds of servitude that the Bible accepted, and he sometimes notes that proslavery theologians made similar distinction.

Noll explores Christians' efforts, from their partisan positions, to trace the influence of the belief in the work of divine providence in the unfolding events. He concludes that they were so patently tendentious that their attempts fueled religious skepticism. Noll perceptively describes the prevalent views of providence, but he does not examine--except in statements by Union president Abraham Lincoln--more nuanced and sophisticated discussions of its operation. He does not quote, for example, on providence, Robert Livingston Stanton's The Church and the Rebellion (New York, 1864), the border states' Presbyterian Declaration and Testimony of Ministers and Ruling Elders ... (1865), or southern ministers' postwar statements on the finality of wartime emancipation.

Noll argues that the Civil War crisis contributed much to the later decline of religious authority in the nation. The failure of evangelical Protestants to solve the slavery question by theology, he maintains, left them unable to address the racial and industrial problems of Gilded Age society. It fostered secularization and privatization of religion and marginalized the role that faith and the Bible would play in later American history. Noll recognizes that many other forces contributed to the change, and he does not argue his causal interpretation in a detailed study of postbellum events. He does not assess the contributions that northern and black evangelicals made to race relations during Reconstruction, or quote contemporaries as describing the "failure" and its effects in the way he does. Noll's prophetic judgment may sometimes go beyond his historical analysis, but generally he shows that historical analysis and prophetic judgment can support each other well.

JACK P. MADDEX JR.

University of Oregon